Search Results for: smart edit

Writers' Tools of the Trade

TOOLS OF MY TRADE: SmartEdit Update & Review

SmartEdit has had two product updates since my initial review of the product so I figured it was also time for an updated review. I had some PC issues so I never actually got to try version 2, so I skipped directly to SmartEdit 3.011 (released August 8, 2013) and opened  my current Work in Progress (due to the publisher in 4 days, while I leave for a convention in Savannah, GA in 2 days–fyi). The first thing I noticed upon opening the updated interface was the Word Processor feature and the New Document option, so you can write directly into the SmartEdit window. And where the first version I’d tried required I save my Word .doc as an RTF, the program now supports the Word .doc (and I read, also OpenOffice). This will save me a step and some time. The Adverb Usage List still remains my favorite feature and that’s the function I go to first to purge my manuscript of junk words. I usually end up cutting over a hundred unneeded words from a full length novel. The other things I loved in the original version–the Repeated Words, and Repeated Phrases, and the Proper Nouns checks are all still there […]

Writers' Tools of the Trade

Product Review – SmartEdit

APRIL 2013 UPDATE: A new version has been released. I hope to test it by month’s end when I finish my current work in progress. Please note the following review is for a past version, not the most recent. Some of you may remember my Tools of My Trade blog series. I did it in July of 2011 and again in July of 2012. One of the featured tools I wrote up, which I use for every manuscript to clean it up before I submit to my editor, is SMARTEDIT. Imagine my surprise when the developer of SmartEdit contacted me asking if I’d like to try out the new version they just released. Being a technology geek, I of course agreed. I downloaded the new version and used it to go through the 82,000 word romance novel due to my editor at Kensington on January 1st. By the time I was done, the program had identified, and I had cut hundreds of unnecessary words out of the manuscript, making it stronger and cleaner. Here are my initial thoughts while they are fresh in my head. To save time and effort, I have pulled some of the feedback I emailed to […]

Writers' Tools of the Trade

Tools of My Trade: Day 5 SmartEdit

An author friend of mine suggested a self-editing program she uses–AutoCrit. I tried it and I found it was indeed an eye opener. It called me out on all the words I overuse. However, unless I wanted to pay something like $79 a year for the pleasure of using the tool, I could only paste 500 (or maybe it was 800 words) in at a time, and there was a limit to the number of uses per day. For an 80,000 word novel, that would suck. So when self-editing my recently released NEW ORLEANS short story, I ran a sample through, knew where my challenges and problem areas were, and kept those in mind while word-smithing the work. It definitely helped tighten the writing in the piece. Shortly after, I read (I think in GalleyCat MediaBistro) about another program that sounded like it did the same thing as AutoCrit so I checked it out. It was SmartEdit. It’s free to download, at least for now, and it analyzes the entire document as a whole at once. It finds, counts and lists the follwing: clichés, dialogue tags, repeated words, and ‘ly’ words. You click on one of the items in the […]